Armageddon (89 page)
At 1640 on the afternoon of 25 April, a reconnaissance group of the U.S. 69th Division met men of the Soviet 58th Guards Division at Torgau on the Elbe. The scenes of warm greetings between allies, filmed by a host of cameramen and screened in cinemas across the Western world, masked a much harsher reality. “Take no initiative in organizing friendly meetings,” a stern order from the Soviet front commanders warned all units. “Where meetings do take place, behave in a friendly way, but inform commanders immediately, and give no information about operational plans or unit objectives.” An American corps commander found his Soviet counterpart eager to toast the armies of Roosevelt, and sought in vain to convince the Russian that Roosevelt was dead. Beria’s representatives were soon reporting instances of “suspicious remarks” by Americans, including that of a U.S. officer who allegedly spoke disrespectfully about the competence of Soviet artillerymen. A British officer complained to the Russians about the treatment of some liberated British prisoners who were savagely interrogated by the Red Army before being thrown into a pigsty with German PoWs. The Russians replied icily that this letter was “grossly impolite, and that if any further such communications were received, they would not be answered.”
Yet statesmanship demanded a loftier vision of the junction at Torgau between the crusaders for freedom and the agents of tyranny. “After long journeys, toils and victories across the land and oceans; across many deadly battlefields, the Armies of the great Allies have traversed Germany and have joined hands together,” said Churchill in a broadcast that night. “Now, their task will be the destruction of all remnants of German military resistance, the rooting out of the Nazi power and the subjugation of Hitler’s Reich.” Field-Marshal von Paulus, surveying the ruin of his country from a Soviet prison cell, observed contemptuously: “If the British and Americans had not dilly-dallied so much, we could have got this whole thing over a great deal sooner.”
ELEVENTH HOUR
B
ETWEEN THE
E
LBE
and the Oder, the civilians of Hitler’s shrunken dominions awaited their fate in a curious state of submission, even paralysis. “Berlin never seemed so peaceful to me as in the April days before the commencement of the battle,” wrote Paul von Stemann, the Danish journalist, “girls dressed up for spring, little real work left to do, streets empty of traffic.” Robert Ley, Hitler’s labour minister, penned an article for
Der Angriff,
extolling the virtues of a society which had shed possessions and worries, was no longer encumbered with all the petty responsibilities of peacetime life and property. “Thus we are marching towards victory,” wrote Ley, “stripped of all gratuitous ballast, and without the burden of materialistic baggage.” Soviet pilots flying over Berlin described an uncanny stillness on the eastern side, with trains and trams standing idle, factory chimneys dead, while from the far suburbs of the city an endless stream of cars and carts and people on foot moved westward.
Hans Siwik, the Hitler Jugend leader who had escaped from East Prussia, called at the Reich Chancellery to see some old comrades from the days when he served with Hitler’s personal SS bodyguard. Otto Günsche, the Führer’s SS adjutant, ventured a notable banality to his old comrade: “Things are not going too well.” When Siwik saw Hitler, whom he had revered so deeply for so long, he was appalled by the senile, broken figure before him. He received a perfunctory handshake and was disturbed to notice that the hand was ice-cold. The atmosphere around the Chancellery and the bunker was fevered, and on every side Siwik heard words of mistrust, bitterness, recrimination. It was plain that the end was close. “It all seemed so unjust,” he said. Siwik was one among many of his fellow countrymen still incapable of comprehending what the Third Reich, in which he had been a minute but eager cog, had brought upon the world.
Even some sophisticated Germans remained remarkably naive about the prospect before them. Many who could have fled did not do so. “We pretended that, having been through these years of anguish and humiliation, we now wanted to witness the final and total destruction of the evil,” recorded von Stemann. “Perhaps we were motivated by a vain and boyish pride to show that we could make it. Perhaps we had more unrealistic fantasies. None of us expected the end to come as it did. I believe we had a vision of a Cecil B. de Mille picturesque and well-planned parade of the Allied leaders, moving in a great cortège past the Siegssaule and through the Brandenburg gate.”
Kertzendorf, the lovely mansion south of Berlin owned by Freddy Horstmann, a portly, moustachioed former diplomat, had been destroyed by bombing. Horstmann remained in the gardener’s cottage, crowded with art treasures salvaged from the big house. He awaited the arrival of the British and Americans with equanimity, confident of patronage from prominent Allied acquaintances. “They are all my friends,” he declared expansively. A former ambassador in Lisbon and Brussels, Horstmann had abandoned government service when told that his promotion would require a divorce from his half-Jewish wife Lally. An indolent sophisticate who lived in great style on the family newspaper fortune, he had endured the war by simply denying its reality. Horstmann and his friends agreed sagely that there could be no battle for Berlin, for the means no longer existed to defend the city. A friend arriving to stay in the spring of 1945 apologized for having been obliged to abandon a camembert cheese on his train when it was strafed. “
Ach
, a camembert!” said Horstmann regretfully. “What a pity. When shall I ever eat a camembert again?” He never did so, for he died in a Russian labour camp.
Until days before the Russians arrived, at great country houses around Berlin there were still liveried servants, fine wines and candle-lit dinners at the tables of the doomed Prussian nobility. The gravel of their drives was raked, the gardens tended by large staffs of prisoners, doing duty for family retainers absent at the front. “The participants appeared to take it all for granted, and behaved as if this life would go on for ever,” wrote Paul von Stemann. “Most families had lived on their estates for hundreds of years, but were soon to join the stream of refugees, leaving the splendours behind to be looted and vandalised.” At a big party one night in the house of his married daughter, General Geyr von Schweppenburg, former
Panzergruppe
commander in Normandy, lost his temper and denounced the reckless frivolity of dancing while Germany stood on the brink of catastrophe. The young guests ignored his outburst. They partied on far into the night. In Berlin itself, von Stemann observed that “dancing became uninhibited, drink for intoxication not enjoyment. Love became sex.” Many people of both sexes became fiercely determined not to face the last act as virgins.
There was a Cuban dance band, which had appeared from no one knew where, performing nightly in the basement of a ruin in the Tiergarten. The Cubans became fashionable. Money seemed suddenly irrelevant, supplanted by barter. Unexpected stocks of coffee, cigarettes and cognac were unearthed. Half a kilo of coffee could be exchanged for twenty litres of petrol. There was heavy traffic in false identity papers and car number plates. Fatalism, lassitude gained sway everywhere outside the ranks of those soldiers preparing to fight their last battle. Prisoners of war alleged to be clearing city bomb rubble sat idle by fires lit in the debris, apparently unsupervised. Unarmed soldiers and deserters wandered the streets, with little effective interference from the military police. The Third Reich’s deadly grip was loosening, its lifeblood seeping away into the horror-soaked soil of Germany. Labour gangs began to build defensive barricades in the suburbs. Berliners observed that they would hold up the Russians for exactly sixty-five minutes: an hour laughing, followed by five minutes sweeping the pathetic obstacles aside.
“The Berliners carried on forced by fear,” wrote von Stemann. “They were frightened all the time: of their own secret police; of the bombers; of the Russians; and of the revenge of millions of forced labourers. They were frightened of their own past, and knew it would catch up with them.” Yet despite all the preparations, there were welcome rumours among the inhabitants that the capital would not be defended at all. For a few brief weeks, Berliners thought themselves fortunate people, as elsewhere across Germany people fled for their lives in their millions.
Ilse Bayer, twenty-five-year-old daughter of a Berlin haulage contractor, was the wife of a naval petty officer based at Swinemünde on the Baltic. Through January and February, she had found refugees from East Prussia knocking on the door of her billet. Now, it was her own turn to become a fugitive. On the afternoon of 12 March, a secretary from naval headquarters ran down their street, warning families of an impending air attack. Frau Bayer scooped up her two younger children in her arms, while the eldest ran in front of her to a shelter. The bombing seemed to last an eternity. At one point, an admiral appeared and wanted to evict all the civilians from the shelter, since it stood on Kriegsmarine property. No one heeded him.
The Bayers emerged at last to find flames everywhere, their own home in ruins, the ships alongside the quays burning fiercely. Ilse believed that her husband Walter was at sea, but suddenly she saw him standing there in front of her. “I almost clawed him to see if he was real.” The commanding officer of his destroyer, an uncommonly humane man, had sent Bayer ashore in a launch to retrieve his family. His wife found herself struggling desperately to get her small children, utterly distraught, up the side of the destroyer from the pitching boat. Next afternoon, the navy landed the refugees amid the ruins of Kiel. The Bayers were fortunate to find a lodging with an elderly couple in a village a few miles outside the city, where the children cried themselves to sleep. In the days that followed, there were renewed flashes of terror, when the roads were strafed by passing fighter-bombers, “which killed a lot of people at that time.” But the Bayer family rejoiced in their unexpected good fortune. They lived.
Eleonore von Joest, who had trekked from East Prussia to Berlin in January, found herself once more on the road in April with her mother, seven children, a housemaid and a Polish farmworker called Miron. They could hear gunfire from both east and west as their carts plodded slowly onwards towards Holstein. They hoped desperately that the western ones were closer. This second trek proved even more frightening for the women than the first from East Prussia, because of constant strafing by American and British aircraft. All along the roadside lay dead horses, wrecked carts, dead people. The brilliant sunlit spring weather mocked their terror. They reached Holstein on 5 May, after a journey of almost 200 miles.
One day in April, Klaus Fischer and his mother were walking past the old Lamsdorfer bridge in Jena when they saw soldiers working on it, laying cables in a trench, then carefully replacing the cobblestones on top of them. They were preparing the bridge for demolition, and indeed destroyed it hours before the Russians arrived. With meticulous efficiency even amid disaster, the city fathers arranged for Jena’s streetcars to be divided, half placed on each side of the river before the bridge was blown. Everyone prepared for the end in different ways. Henner Pflug fell into conversation on a train with a young Waffen SS man. “Surely it’s all over,” said Pflug. The soldier said defiantly: “Oh we’ll lick the Russians yet!” But then he added impulsively that he had two spare shirts. Would Pflug like them? “I shan’t be needing them any more.” The civilian took the shirts, and the two men parted.
Lieutenant Rolf-Helmut Schröder served briefly on the staff of General Walter Botsch, commanding LIII Corps near Bonn. Day after day, Schröder’s principal duty was to move pins on the map, to mark Allied advances which German forces were impotent to arrest. He watched Russian prisoners digging emplacements to house guns which had long ago been destroyed west of the Rhine. One day Schröder ran into the command bunker pursued by a barrage of exploding grenades, and indeed carrying in the back of his head a fragment from one of them. “The Americans are here,” he announced tersely. In a room adjoining the military operations centre, he glimpsed a cluster of Nazi Party officials, policemen and women, all very drunk—“a bad memory.” His general hastily put on his overcoat inside out, so that the red lapels of high command were invisible. The staff wrecked the radio equipment, then decamped. In a few moments, the bunker was almost empty. The young officer was bemused when a civilian entered. It was the local museum director, who also happened to be the uncle of his girlfriend. “Herr Schröder!” exclaimed the visitor. “What are you doing here?” The lieutenant shrugged: “Waiting to die.” “Don’t you know your general’s done a bunk?”
Schröder escaped on foot to his family home in Westphalia. Under a railway embankment on the edge of Hagen, his own town, he met two German tanks, waiting for the Americans. “We’ve got thirty rounds between us,” said one of the commanders. “When they’re gone, we’re finished.” To his mother’s consternation, Schröder arrived home with a fellow officer, his driver and batman. They all put on civilian clothes, and Schröder buried his pistol. But he soon realized that escape was impracticable. He dressed once more in his uniform, and surrendered to two American NCOs. One said: “This is all crap—let him go home.” But the other American insisted that Schröder must be held, removed his Iron Cross and started him on the journey to a PoW camp.
Late in March after his unit was overrun, Helmut Schmidt decided to try to get back to his wife in Hamburg, rather than allow himself to be taken prisoner. He and two other men set off eastwards from the American front, walking by night and hiding by day. At first, they received considerable help and kindness from German peasants. As they reached the north German plain, fear of Allied reprisals made local people become progressively more reluctant to shelter fugitive soldiers. They spent several nights huddled beneath bushes under the stars. At last, Schmidt reached his family.
When Sergeant George Schwemmer of 10th SS Panzer was discharged from the hospital where he had spent February being treated for frostbite, he was sent to command a platoon in a battle group north-east of Stettin. Discipline was visibly collapsing. There were increasingly bitter wrangles between the fanatics, determined to fight to the end, and those who recognized the futility of doing so. They were suddenly ordered aboard open rail trucks, and shipped south into Saxony, under Schörner’s ruthless command. They called the field-marshal “the soldiers’ claw,” because he was not above personally arresting stragglers and herding them back into battle. Deserters were being shot daily—Schörner had executed three battalion commanders in a week for alleged dereliction of duty—but in mid-April Schwemmer decided that he would take the risk. He knew the Americans had already overrun Blankenburg, where his wife was living. The sergeant and a few others slipped away across the Oder bridge. They marched in formed ranks, to give an impression of moving under orders, and begged overnight shelter in houses they passed. The fugitives made one attempt to surrender, advancing with hands in the air towards Americans whom they encountered near Linz. They were met by machine-gun fire, which killed a twelve-year-old boy. After that, Schwemmer simply took to the countryside like tens of thousands of others. He walked and walked, until at last he became the first soldier from Blankenburg to reach home, a distinction for which he was deeply grateful.